The Convalescent Corpse by Nicola Slade - Book Blitz + Giveaway
The Convalescent Corpse
A story of Family, Rationing and Inconvenient Corpses.
Life in 1918 has brought loss and grief and hardship to the three Fyttleton sisters. Helped only by their grandmother (a failed society belle and expert poacher) and hindered by a difficult suffragette mother, as well as an unruly chicken-stealing dog and a house full of paying-guests, they now have to deal with the worrying news that their late – and unlamented – father may not be dead after all. And on top of that, there’s a body in the ha-ha.
‘I love it. A delightfully unusual mystery with wonderful characterisation and historical detail.’ - LESLEY COOKMAN BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF
THE LIBBY SARJEANT MYSTERY SERIES
Purchase Links
https://amzn.to/2RrkDoz https://amzn.to/2ODJeYR
Excerpt
Excerpt
Chapter 1, Opening
paragraphs
I sometimes have a
brief prologue, particularly in my mysteries. It’s a useful device to remind
the reader that there will, eventually, be a murder!
Spring
1918 Ramalley, Hampshire
‘We were all
coping splendidly until my elder sister Alix decided to become a nun…’
I
looked at what I’d written and sighed because there is nothing splendid about
the way my family lurches from one crisis to another. As always, I began my
diary with high hopes on New Year’s Day, intending to produce noble, uplifting
sentiments to impress future generations. Not like Pepys’s diary, which,
according to my former headmistress, is not at all respectable, or even Queen
Victoria’s (indisputably respectable), but a famous diary in its own right.
Once again real life interfered and for the third year in a row I had abandoned
my journal by the second week of January. However, so many things have happened
– although not particularly noble or uplifting – that I’ve started writing it
again, beginning in February.
Between
last November and the end of March, five important things occurred. The first,
and by far the worst, was the thing that almost broke us, the thing we can
still scarcely bear to talk about, so I’ll say it quickly. Early in November we
received a telegram announcing that my brother Bertie had been posted Missing Believed Killed on the first of
the month, his nineteenth birthday. No trace of him has ever been found.
The second thing that happened, about ten days before
Christmas, was that our recently deceased next-door neighbour turned out not to
have owned his house at all. In fact it actually belonged to Mother, Papa
having bought it – along with our own house – with the proceeds of a win on the
Derby in 1908. (The winning horse was ‘Signorinetta’ which means Little Miss.
We like to believe he chose it because the name reminded him of his three
daughters but with Papa it was never safe to make assumptions.)
We did know the house was in Mother’s name and we also
knew about the win on the Derby, but not that Papa had bought the adjoining
house too. No doubt fearing the weight of disapproval from his female
relatives, he had never got round to mentioning that he’d also put the other
house in Mother’s name. Papa was lost in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915,
so it was quite a shock to us all when the solicitor arrived to explain the
situation.
The third thing that happened, a week or so into the
New Year, was that my elder sister Alix announced that she intended to become a
nun. This was because she had diligently attended every party she could cajole
her way into in the town, but still failed to attract a man willing to become
the husband she so desperately wanted. The nun idea was speedily cast aside and
instead she decided to volunteer as a nursing assistant at the convalescent
home for officers at Groom Hall, the gloomy hunting lodge next door to us. Her
reasoning was that a wounded officer, being unable to escape her attentions,
might well be a good marital prospect provided his injuries were neither
unsightly nor injurious to the married state.
Number Four in the catalogue of life-changing events
came a few weeks into Alix’s time up at the Hall, when a moment of inspiration
led to my Brilliant Idea.
Oh
yes, there was a fifth thing, but that came not long afterwards. Somebody died
and it wasn’t from natural causes or a from a war injury. It was murder.
Author Bio – Nicola Slade lives in Hampshire where she writes historical and contemporary mysteries and women’s fiction. While her three children were growing up she wrote stories for children and for women’s magazines before her first novel, Scuba Dancing, was published in 2005. Among other jobs, Nicola has been an antiques dealer and a Brown Owl! She loves travelling and at one time, lived in Egypt for a year. The Convalescent Corpse is Nicola's 9th novel. Nicola is also a member of a crime writers’ panel, The Deadly Dames https://www.facebook.com/DeadlyDames/
Social Media Links – www.nicolaslade.wordpress.com www.nicolaslade.com
Twitter: @nicolasladeuk
https://www.facebook.com/nicolasladeuk/ https://www.pinterest.co.uk/nicola8703 (I have a board for each book)
Giveaway – Win a paperback copy of The House of Ladywell (Open Internationally)
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2 Comments
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